Recent advances in pharmaceutical bioengineering have stimulated the interest of the food industry in new delivery systems for hormones and other growth promoters.
Steroids, and especially anabolic steroids, are widely used to promote the growth of cattle and other food animals. Such growth promotion is desirable among food producers because it maximizes the weight gain per animal per amount of food consumed.
Currently, steroid products are usually supplied to the animal in the form of a non-biodegradable, implantable steroid time-release pellet which is placed in the ear skin, part of the animal which is discarded upon slaughter. Such delivery systems have been recently reviewed (Sawyer, G. J., et al., Austral. Vet. J. 65:101-108 (1988). The pellet systems cannot provide a pulsed dose of steroid and are often reimplanted two or three times throughout the life of the animal with each implant being administered by a specially designed injector gun.
The use of pellet delivery systems has not met with complete success and they have many disadvantages. The main health concern is that misuse of the non-degradable pellet system may result in harmful levels of such steroids in the meat provided to consumers. Such misuse may arise if the pellet is misplaced. For example, if the pellet is misplaced in the neck or behind the ear instead of in the ear skin, the possibility is raised that the remains of the pellet could be ingested by the consumer. Also, a farmer may mistakenly inject more than one pellet at a time. Also, the pellets are often not successfully implanted and fall to the ground in the treatment pen.
Disadvantages of the currently available pellet implants further include their inability to allow for combination of different drugs with highly controlled release rates in the same unit, and the fact that only 40-70% of the active agent is released. Lastly, commercial implants do not offer a capability in adjusting the duration of action and because of the nondegradable polymeric excipient and the relatively low total surface area of the pellets, it is very difficult to adjust the dosage of the active agent.
Compudose.sup.R is a polymeric controlled release implant device for use with beef cattle which is designed to provide for the continuous delivery of estradiol-17.beta. for 200 or 400 days (Ferguson, T. H. et al., J. Cont. Rel 8:45-54 (1988)). The compudose.sup.R implant is made by coating a nonmedicated silicone rubber core with a thin layer of silicone runner which contains micronized crystalline estradiol-17.beta.. However, the device is not biodegradable.
Biodegradable particles for use in the delivery of steroid hormones have been described (U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,239,332, 4,489,055, 4,683,288, 4,677,191, 4,675,189, 4,530,840, 4,542,025 and 4,389,330.
However, none of the above references have suggested or disclosed a method of increasing animal growth by providing a biodegradable microparticle delivery of steroid growth promoters in food animals and a need exists for better, safer delivery systems for steroids in food animals.